Since Andrea was on one of her cell-phone-free reconnaissance missions, she never did get back to me on mushroom hunting in the mountains and I didn’t try too hard to contact her beyond a quick text message.

 

She had been doing things like this for a while now. Every once and a while, usually on the weekends but not always, she would disappear, all attempts to contact her would be fruitless, until three or fours days later when she would breeze in like she had never been missing. It was disconcerting, what if she got abducted and sold into white slavery? How were we supposed to know? How could she leave Jan and me hanging like that? Poor Jan! It must have been so awkward to explain to Milan why after enthusiastically accepting his invitation, Andrea was suspiciously absent. I felt embarrassed for him.

 

But then we had a wonderful time anyway. So … her loss.

 

I checked Leslie’s instructions for the fifth time. Having eyes with a somewhat inopportune sense of humor makes you paranoid about details. I’ve only ever misread my way to disaster once or twice, but the repercussions are felt in a dozen little obsessive-compulsive routines everyday.

 

I scanned the directions again.

 

Line B. Check.

 

Stop Černý Most… little chance of missing that, it’s the last stop.

 

Platform 3.

 

Platform 3, Platform 3 Platform 3 Platform 3 Platform 3…

 

Someone will be waiting outside the bus with your ticket.

 

I had had only 45 minutes in between my last class at the Custom House and the Metro leaving for Černý Most, which turned out to be just enough to shower, grab my bag and take off for the tram back down the White Mountain. Jan had told me he was going to recork the bathroom―I was glad to see he hadn’t.

 

I arrived at Černý Most 20 minutes before the bus to Krkonoše was set to leave and yet no one I recognize was on line a Platform 3.

 

Okay … maybe I’m early.

 

My bladder cramped in the uneasy lull that followed. A jolt of tension surged through my wrists and left my fingers tingling.

 

I swallowed the dry lump in my throat.

 

I had 15 minutes.

 

I glanced at the back of the bus―its window and clear row of back seats.

 

Bus ride was three hours.

 

Damnit.

 

Occupational hazard of nerves that sometimes make things up as they go along: I'm prone to panic attacks. Especially in situations like these.

 

Fifteen minutes, raced back to Platform 3 and again saw no one I knew.

 

Except for one face.

 

Drew.

 

Jesus fucking Christ, of all people!!

 

“Hey.”

 

“Hey, hurry up the bus is about to leave. Here’s your ticket, get on.”

 

“Where is everyone?”

 

“On the bus. We’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

 

There wasn’t any time to argue, so I jumped on board and shifted in until I had rooted all the familiar faces out of the crowd.

 

“Hey,” Meghan smiled. “You made it! We were getting worried.”

 

There were no free seats on the bus. So I stood.

 

“I got here fifteen minutes ago and I didn’t see anyone.”

 

“Oh,” she frowned apologetically. “We just got on the bus.”

 

“Wasn’t someone supposed to be waiting outside with my ticket?”

 

“Yeah, they didn’t show, but you got on all right … so you know…”

 

Well yes, but that didn’t change the fact that I would be standing for the three hour drive all the way up into the mountains.

 

Meghan coughed harshly and sprayed her throat with bright absinthe colored fluid.

 

“Cold?” I asked.

 

“Flu from hell. Can’t shake it.”

 

That didn’t really surprise me. In the time Meghan and I had lived together she didn’t exactly take care of herself. Not unless doctors are recommending four servings of hops and three hours of sleep now.

 

She popped a pair of white chalky looking pills.

 

“Maybe you shouldn’t be medicating so … uh thoroughly. Just give your body time to heal.”

 

She shrugged. “Blew off too many classes already.”

 

As the bus lurched into motion I spent my time getting better acquainted with the people I had come to Prague with, and prodding Leslie’s new month’s worth of TEFL trainees with staged questions only so I could make wise and omniscient ‘let me tell you about Prague…’ comments.

 

I finally got to meet some of Leslie’s past students: Betsy, Janet, and Eric.

 

I had met Eric about a month before at the Tulip. Leslie likes to get all his current trainees together with all his past successes on a regular basis. The Tulip-- a delightful expat bar still blissfully hidden from British tourists and stags-- was the natural venue.

 

While Mandy silently rated the various fuckability status of all the men crowded around our table (Eric would be pleases to know he was high on this list) and I tried to dig for reassurance from verifiably employed teachers, Eric regaled the large table with stories of the drunken mayhem that had befallen the August 2005 class.

 

That was the first time I saw Eric. Okay I could see that he was attractive, I didn’t need Mandy’s sex-latent heckling secretly whispered in my ear to get that. But I could also see that we were sitting at opposite ends of the table in more ways than one, and thus I ignored most of his hilarious tale of Joe-- the deep South graduate who got drunk and got into a fist fight with some Serbians on the tram, ended up busting his teeth through his lip and stumbling (partially carried by Eric and another friend) drunk, bleeding profusely into the emergency room.

 

…so maybe I listened just a little.

 

Meghan showed up briefly that night, two hours late. She stayed three minutes, that was just long enough to look around and ask us if Drew was there. Obviously he wasn't.

 

“You know,” Drew said as the bus swung to the right. “What’s your seat number? You can demand your seat. You have a ticket.”

 

“Oh, it’s okay…”

 

“No it’s not.” Drew frowned. “You made a reservation. You’re guaranteed a seat.”

 

“Yeah,” Meghan joined in. “What’s your number?”

 

“It’s really okay.” I said this although I was wobbling on the issue. I really did not want to stand for three hours. I looked down at my ticket, various reservation-less passengers sliding lowly into their seats, and scanned the seat numbers for a match.

 

“Here, give me the ticket. I’ll demand your seat for you.” Drew offered all too sweetly.

 

You remember Harley’s? Yup, the same sort of collector’s sweetness.

 

I bristled.

 

“No thanks.”

 

I looked down at the ticket and the numbers again, making sure I hadn’t miss read anything. 

 

“Oh you need more of a backbone,” Meghan rolled her eyes. "Just demand what you've paid for."

 

“Bitch.” I smiled. “You’re in my seat.”

 

------------------------------------------------

 

Well how could I throw Meghan out when she wasn’t feeling well?

 

So I stood for a while until a few local stops had cleared off a place for me. Then I got lured into a conversation about hockey with the Goodlanders, a couple who had been part of our training class. They were so close we never spoke of them separately.

 

“How can you go to Sparta games?” He snorted. “It has to be Slavia all the way. The working class team! Sparta just throws their money around to buy championship!”

 

“They’re closer to my house. Slavia is all the way out in Prague 10!”

 

“So? It’s worth the trip to see them play in that beautiful arena.”

 

“That will cost you $14 to get into.” I snorted.

 

“No different than the US.”

 

But a significant mark up from Czech prices. For my birthday I treated myself to a Sparta-Pardubice game (and secretly rooted for Pardubice, but that’s another story) and got into the standing cheap seats for 40 krowns, a stunning $2. The cheap seats are directly behind the goal at ice level, close enough to see the fire in the players’ eyes and catch them cursing under their breath.

 

Every time a shot missed the net it rebounded off the glass in front of me with an exhilarating crack. I knew hockey was a fast game, but you never really get a sense of how fast until you’re ice level.

 

And to be immersed in that crowd: all the maniacs that in North America are properly regulated to pens in the rafters, are standing in a mob around the enemy goal. It’s a little Shakespearian; the groundlings taunting and goading the players while the wealthier fans pay for seats elevated above the mob.

 

I can’t really hate Sparta. I prefer other teams, but I can’t really hate Sparta. Everything nasty people say about Sparta in the Czech Republic, people in America say about my favorite NHL team too. That they buy their talent instead of developing them, check. That they put players who should rightly have retired (or stayed retired) on the ice, check. That they have the loudest, most obnoxious fans in the league, check.

 

So I really can’t hate Sparta.

 

---------------------------------------------------

 

Somehow I made it through three hours on a shifty, cramped, bathroomless bus without panicking. Towards the end the minty, eucalyptus stuff that Meghan was snorting every 30 seconds was starting to make me nauseous but I was able to shut that out until the bus wheezed to a stop.

 

Sometime during the journey-- while Eric and his friend Gary passed a bottle of Becherovka back and forth above our heads-- Meghan grabbed my arm and pointed out the window.

 

“Look!”

 

The mountain road was flanked by acres of skinny-tree forests. The remaining leaves created kaleidoscopes of greens and yellows across the soft supple earth. It looked vast, as if the two lane road we were on was the only disturbance for miles.

 

“Doesn’t it remind you of Virginia?”

 

“Pennsylvania actually,” I murmured, but her point was well taken. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or where you go, you’ll always find traces of somewhere you know. There’s a square in Malá Strana that invokes the briefest rush of comfort when it peeks out from the narrow alleyway down from Malostranská station. For a moment something about it reminds me of Greenwich Village. I suppose it’s part of human nature: to find comfort in the familiar and in the absence of comfort to find the familiar.

 

As we piled off the bus and in the middle of a pitch black nowhere. Leslie appeared and loaded our stuff in fours into his car and ferried us up the mountain to the pension run by his wife’s cousins.

 

When I say the middle of nowhere I mean it. The bus let us off on the side of the road, not even a bus stop sign in sight.